I don't understand why every non-technical person who comes to do work in my apartment messes up my fucking router.

The cleaning lady - multiple times knocked the antennas partially off. Like fucking clock work. I don't get it, why is the cleaning lady attracted to my router antennas and why does she need to be so hard on them? Whatever.

The most ridiculous episode was today. And it wasn't the cleaning lady. I had a few people here doing some work today and the woman in charge who was here informed me before that they might have to move the furniture "a little."

I come home, and like a bad omen, the plastic parts on BOTH my router antennas are missing. Completely gone. It's just the the wires. Now, the router still works fine in my tiny apartment, but it is a fancy Asus router (I learned the hard way not to buy cheap routers) and I'd like it to not have fucking wires as antennas.

I email the woman (paraphrased):

Me: hey, it seems the antennas got knocked off my router, do you have any idea where they might have went?

Her: Apologies if we didn't put everything back (no shit you didn't, that's why I've had to email you). If we knocked the antennas off the router (fucking "if"???? I literally just told you in my email that they were knocked off) , they are probably somewhere by the window on the floor (they weren't).

And I still haven't found them. Why the fuck do these people seemingly attack my router? I can't figure out what it is about it. You would think people would be more careful around electronics but naaah. Anyway, going to go keep looking for my router antennas.

My boss is technically restricted shall we say.

As the cto I have also been designated office IT guy. Which means apparently fixing the printer. Which is ok I guess. I mean it's bullsh*t but hey.

Anyway, about 6 months ago he said he needed a new laptop. He lives his life in excel and outlook, and even though the whole company uses google docs for everything he still exports everything to excel, makes a copy, then saves it back to drive so everything gets out of sync.

It's a fun problem that I have banned everyone from doing obviously but he continues.

Anyway, anyway, he wanted a new windows laptop naturally. I said to spend about £700 on a decent machine rather than buying something cheap that will frustrate and not last long.

He doesn't listen and gets some old windows 7 machine for £300. It's an alright spec for 2009; he must not have got the memo about it being 2017.

4 months go by and he says he needs a new laptop because this one is too slow (not least because he opens 400 chrome tabs and never reboots his machine). Anyway, I fix the problem of uninstalling all his bloatware and it runs quicker but he has his heart set on a new machine.

He insists.

I suggest he spend the money this time so he literally doesn't buy a new one in 4 months. I suggest the surface book that's £1200. A little overpriced but he will love the touch screen, it's powerful enough and it's windows. Ticks all the boxes for him.

He suddenly decides he wants a Mac.

I tell him it will be a nightmare for everyone if he does that.

He insists.

I suggest the Mac book pro as I've had mine for 6 years now and it's still going strong. It's a little more expensive than the surface but it will last.

He then says he wants the air.

I say they haven't updated them in ages and they aren't actually that powerful.

He insists.

That night he just buys an air from the Apple Store.

WHY THE FU*k ARE YOU ASKING ME FOR ADVICE IF YOURE NOT GOING TO LISTEN YOU MOTHERFUC*er. WASTING MY TIME AND YOURS.

Was very close to rage quitting when he wanted me to back up his old machine but didn't bring in his hard drive and didn't want to put it in the cloud. #whatDoYouWantMeToDoWithYourOldPornCollection

To top it all off I ran some benchmarks and my 6 year old Mac book pro is more powerful than his "brand new" air.

*Romantic candlelit dinner*

GF: "What are you thinking about, my love?"

Me: "The chocolate custard always seems to behave differently under stress than vanilla. It has a lower base viscosity, but a similar shear thickening. I was wondering whether anyone has ever made a database of all custard brands and flavors together with their viscosities"

My brain: *Oh fuck, that's not what I'm supposed to say during a romantic dinner*

GF: "Do you wanna check whether we can find a cheap second hand viscometer.... wait.... no.... you'd need a rheometer for that, right? Do you think we could build one ourselves?"

Me: *blinks in awe*

Even after 15 years, I'm still just puzzled, she really fucking is my soulmate

Started talking with someone about general IT stuff. At some point we came to the subject of SSL certificates and he mentioned that 'that stuff is expensive' and so on.

Kindly told him about Let's Encrypt and also that it's free and he reacted: "Then I'd rather have no SSL, free certificates make you look like you're a cheap ass".

So I told him the principle of login/registration thingies and said that they really need SSL, whether it's free or not.

"Nahhh, then I'd still rather don't use SSL, it just looks so cheap when you're using a free certificate".

Hey you know what, what about you write that sentence on a whole fucking pack of paper, dip it into some sambal, maybe add some firecrackers and shove it up your ass? Hopefully that will bring some sense into your very empty head.

Not putting a secure connection on a website, (at all) especially when it has a FUCKING LOGIN/REGISTRATION FUNCTION (!?!?!?!!?!) is simply not fucking done in the year of TWO THOUSAND FUCKING SEVENTEEN.

'Ohh but the NSA etc won't do anything with that data'.

Has it, for one tiny motherfucking second, come to mind that there's also a thing called hackers? Malicious hackers? If your users are on hacked networks, it's easy as fuck to steal their credentials, inject shit and even deliver fucking EXPLOIT KITS.
Oh and you bet your ass the NSA will save that data, they have a whole motherfucking database of passwords they can search through with XKeyScore (snowden leaks).

Motherfucker.

I believe this is why companies look for Junior Developers who actually know enough to be a mid or senior developer.

One day, a company that doesn't have the technical chops to know the difference between python and ruby hire a developer who is still in school. That developer doesn't know what he's worth, so the company gets him for pretty cheap. He does amazing things, takes last minute requests, learns some along the way, but eventually leaves because he just got contacted by a recruiter telling him how much he's really worth. He leaves, but the company needs to fill his spot. The company asks the former rockstar all the technologies he used to accomplish his job and throw that into a job description. The company could only really afford the junior so they keep all the stuff about being a junior, but because they need to maintain all the hodge podge stuff the previous developer put in, they need someone with experience enough to jump in.

Lamer rant

For a really long time I said to myself that this is too basic to rant about but lately it became so frequent and extreme that here is my rant about completely clueless users that ask me IT related questions.

Disclaimer: Said users are people that I generally can't avoid. Distant family members, neighbors and etc.

Case 0:
U: I don't know what's happening!! The computer doesn't work!!
M: What do you mean?
U: There's no Facebook! And everything is stuck and no messenger!!!
M: The WiFi on your laptop was off. I turned it on. Still, this doesn't mean that the pc wasn't working.
U: I don't understand this shit!!!

Case 1:
U: I hate this computer!!! It never works!!! Help meeee!!!
M: What now?
U: Where did the internet disappear?!
M: (assuming it's wifi or browser related)
Actually user moved the Chrome window to bottom-right corner and lost it.

Every time I try to show the user how I resolve the issue the user yells that there are too many steps, that they are complicated and that I'm a bad teacher and doing it too fast.

Case 2:
U: My computer is so slow! It barely can load google translate! And I can't listen to music on youtube!! Shitty laptop! It's you! Your computers in the apartment drain everything!!!
M: You have no idea what you are talking about.
U: My husband told me that your computers are heavy and drain everything!
M: What exactly did he tell you that my devices drain?
U: I don't know! All the energy! I believe him! He knows!
M: My computers drain less electricity than your vacuum and I have a separate internet connection. Not only we share nothing but also I drain nothing.
U: Since you appeared all the computers are slow!!!!

Fkk...

Case 3:
U: I don't understand, where is my whatsapp?
M: You can't locate the app on your phone?
U: Yes! F*ck, help me! I'm so angry and I really need this NOW!!!
M: Shut up. I'm already here and helping.
(I open users phone and whatsapp is the active app...)
U: I can' t find my whatsapp with Clara!

F*ck you! F*ck you! Ghckjfshij!!!

Case 4:
(crazy hitting on my door)
U: I don't have THE internet!!!
It's you again! You took all of THE internet!!!
M: No, it doesn't work like that. Your provider is bad, your package is cheap and your cables are of low quality.
U: I need THE internet immediately!!! Stop playing with your typing and fix the facebook or I'll cut the power cables to the house!!

I can go on, just don't think that recalling all those events is healthy for me.

In a user-interface design meeting over a regulatory compliance implementation:
User: “We’ll need to input a city.”
Dev: “Should we validate that city against the state, zip code, and country?”
User: “You are going to make me enter all that data? Ugh…then make it a drop-down. I select the city and the state, zip code auto-fill. I don’t want to make a mistake typing any of that data in.”
Me: “I don’t think a drop-down of every city in the US is feasible.”
Manage: “Why? There cannot be that many. Drop-down is fine. What about the button? We have a few icons to choose from…”
Me: “Uh..yea…there are thousands of cities in the US. Way too much data to for anyone to realistically scroll through”
Dev: “They won’t have to scroll, I’ll filter the list when they start typing.”
Me: “That’s not really the issue and if they are typing the city anyway, just let them type it in.”
User: “What if I mistype Ch1cago? We could inadvertently be out of compliance. The system should never open the company up for federal lawsuits”
Me: “If we’re hiring individuals responsible for legal compliance who can’t spell Chicago, we should be sued by the federal government. We should validate the data the best we can, but it is ultimately your department’s responsibility for data accuracy.”
Manager: “Now now…it’s all our responsibility. What is wrong with a few thousand item drop-down?”
Me: “Um, memory, network bandwidth, database storage, who maintains this list of cities? A lot of time and resources could be saved by simply paying attention.”
Manager: “Memory? Well, memory is cheap. If the workstation needs more memory, we’ll add more”
Dev: “Creating a drop-down is easy and selecting thousands of rows from the database should be fast enough. If the selection is slow, I’ll put it in a thread.”
DBA: “Table won’t be that big and won’t take up much disk space. We’ll need to setup stored procedures, and data import jobs from somewhere to maintain the data. New cities, name changes, ect. ”
Manager: “And if the network starts becoming too slow, we’ll have the Networking dept. open up the valves.”
Me: “Am I the only one seeing all the moving parts we’re introducing just to keep someone from misspelling ‘Chicago’? I’ll admit I’m wrong or maybe I’m not looking at the problem correctly. The point of redesigning the compliance system is to make it simpler, not more complex.”
Manager: “I’m missing the point to why we’re still talking about this. Decision has been made. Drop-down of all cities in the US. Moving on to the button’s icon ..”
Me: “Where is the list of cities going to come from?”
<few seconds of silence>
Dev: “Post office I guess.”
Me: “You guess?…OK…Who is going to manage this list of cities? The manager responsible for regulations?”
User: “Thousands of cities? Oh no …no one is our area has time for that. The system should do it”
Me: “OK, the system. That falls on the DBA. Are you going to be responsible for keeping the data accurate? What is going to audit the cities to make sure the names are properly named and associated with the correct state?”
DBA: “Uh..I don’t know…um…I can set up a job to run every night”
Me: “A job to do what? Validate the data against what?”
Manager: “Do you have a point? No one said it would be easy and all of those details can be answered later.”
Me: “Almost done, and this should be easy. How many cities do we currently have to maintain compliance?”
User: “Maybe 4 or 5. Not many. Regulations are mostly on a state level.”
Me: “When was the last time we created a new city compliance?”
User: “Maybe, 8 years ago. It was before I started.”
Me: “So we’re creating all this complexity for data that, realistically, probably won’t ever change?”
User: “Oh crap, you’re right. What the hell was I thinking…Scratch the drop-down idea. I doubt we’re have a new city regulation anytime soon and how hard is it to type in a city?”
Manager: “OK, are we done wasting everyone’s time on this? No drop-down of cities...next …Let’s get back to the button’s icon …”

Simplicity 1, complexity 0.

Person at work, staring at my keyboard: How much was it?
Me: The keyboard? Oh it's a cheap one for around $30.
Person: Huh... I'll never get you rich boys and your fads.

Well, I don't fucking judge you for your $600 phone, or your $80 shoes or shirts, you cuntwaffle. Fuckin' asshole has the face of a horse's left testicle, is always on his phone, which is arguably fine since he's not a dev but still fuck him, and has the gall to call me bringing my mechanical keyboard to work a 'rich fad'. Oh, that's rich coming from you. Ever seen your ugly mug in your undeserved branded clothing, you unloved, shit-gobbling piece of shit?

"You type so loud." And you breathe too loud but I don't tell you to stop but maybe I ought to.

Go suck on your daddy-uncle's chode for a couple more bucks and stop hanging around me, you judgemental cum-snorting piece of shit.

P.s. it's a cheap keyboard with blue switches but the office is normally noisy and busy enough that no one gives a shit about it. Planning on buying an Anne Pro sometime next month.

So I own a webshop together with a guy I met at one of my previous contract jobs. He said he had a great idea to sell product X because he can get them very cheap from another European country. Actually it is a great idea so we decided to work together on this: I do everything tech related, he does the non tech stuff.

Now we are more than 1 year in business. I setup a VPS, completely configured it, installed and setup the complete webshop, built 2 custom PrestaShop modules, built many customizations, built a completely new order proces (both front and back end), advertised quite some products, did some link building, ensured everything is in place to do proper SEO, wrote some content pages, did administration and tax declarations, rewrote a part of a PrestaShop component because it was so damn inefficient and horribly slow, and then some more. Much more.

He did customer relation management, supplier management and some ad words campaigns. Promised me many times to write the content for our product pages. This guy has an education in marketing but literally said: I'm not gonna invest in creating some marketing plan. I have no ambition in online marketing.

What?! You have the marketing knowledge and skills but refuse to use it to market our webshop and business? What the fuck is wrong with you?!

Today he says to me: 'Hey man, this is becoming an expensive hobby as we don't sell much and have lots of costs. I don't understand why I should be the one to write these content pages. Everything you did in the past 8 months can be done in less than 20 hours! You are a joke and just made it a big deal by spreading your work over so many months. I know for sure because I currently work at a company where I'm surrounded by front end devs! Are you fucking crazy?! You're a liar.'

He talks like this to me every 2 months or so while he can't even deliver the content for 1 single product in 6 fuckin' months! We even had to refund a few of our customers because Mr. client relations manager didn't respond to their e-mails within 1 fucking week!! So I asked him how could that have happened as you do the client relations and support. Well, he replied to me: 'Why didn't YOU respond to our clients? You don't log on in our back office at least once a day?!'.

Of course I do asshole. But YOU don't. He replied that I was lying just like I was lying about what I did for our business.

So, asshole, let's have a look at PrestaShops logs to see who's logging in daily. Well, you can probably guess who's IP was there in most of the entries. It wasn't his.

So, what the fuck have you been doing then?! You can't even manage to respond quickly to a client?!! We have maybe 50 clients and if we get 1 question a month by email it is already a lot. But you keep bitching, complaining and insulting me instead?!!!

Last time he literally admitted on a WhatsApp conversation that he had and still has the hope that he could just sit back and relax and watch me do ALL the work.

Well, guess what you fucking moron. That's not what we agreed upon. You fuckin' retard think you're so smart but you say EVERYTHING on WhatsApp! Including your promises to me. Thank you you fuckin' piece of dog shit because now I have hard evidence and will hand it over to my lawyer to make you pay every god damn cent for all the hours I've spent working on our business. Oh, and I'll take over the webshop and make it a success on my own because I know damn well how to get relevant traffic and thus customers.

You just go get yourself fucked in the ass without lubricant you fuckin' asshole. I have told you you shouldn't fuck with me because I take business very seriously. I even warned you when you were crossing a line again. Well, if you don't listen... You will pay for the consequences. I will be so damn happy to tell you 'I told you so' with a very very big smile on my face. That momemt WILL come, 'partner'.

Fuck you. You will be fucked. Count on that. Fucking asshole.

Learning soft skills.

I'm about as direct with coworkers and managers as I am on devRant. And I still think being painfully direct is often better than playing the heavily politicized office game of thrones.

But sometimes it's better to say:

"CTO, I think we need your skills to build bridges to other departments and manage recruitment. You're the only one who understands both technology and people, so drop your developer role and become our ambassador"

Instead of:

"Dear CTO, your code makes my eyes bleed. Your CS degree was a fucking waste of tax money, and it's quite clear that cheap college beer washed out all of your reasoning skills. We should fill the space you're taking up with a beanbag chair, because you're providing negative value to the company. How many investor cocks did you have to deep throat to get where you are?"

Now, I just pick option one, smile politely, and tell him we need to increase department budget as indemnification for having to work with a retard like him. Uh I mean... "to get developer salaries up to a competitive level so we can retain knowledge"

This is dedicated to all Webdevs, especially those WordPress fanboys.

I was reflecting on some things since I do more frequent freelance jobs at the time. And I have to admit: people are fucking crazy.

I had some serious talk with customers and some serious talk for people I work as subsidiary.

The average customer thinks a nice webpage costs I'm 9-50 bucks. They got some shitty Webhosting for 1-5$/month including domain and think they are set.

They have unclear visions about what they actually want, it all boils down to "I like the design". I made a page for someone who just posted images, no text nothing and I told him a trillion times NEEDS some text, even a fucking picture description would be sufficient, else he'll never score anything at google.

Ofc it got denied, now he's bitching how nobody finds the site when they google his name. The other thing is that Wordpress became the solution for everything.

I'm a fucking certified magento developer and I hate magento with a passion. Magento is an overabstracted clusterfuck and believe me, I did the certification I had to learn more than average about the core. But damn, don't slap woocommerce on everything.

Narrowninded fucktards, the cheap out of the box solution isn't always the best.

Don't cry if you got hacked because you were too dumb to upgrade your wordpress. Don't tell me to do some "enhancements" on a server you probably share with 100 other uses. I can't fix your Webserver with your shitty ftp account.

I also hate WordPress with a burning passion. Cum guzzling cavetroll it is. It has it usages, but don't rely on a core So small every kind of extra functionality has to somehow tinkered on it and then expect it to work flawlessly and for 10$ price.

Of course you can buy a theme that, if it would have been special made for you cost 800$ or more, but it wasn't. It just looks like it from the outside. If you want customization you are at the mercy of the option it provides. I can't even tell how many times i spent whole evenings explaining how their shiny template works. Just to do some crazy shit with JavaScript like rearranging domelements because it didn't work as expected.

I still stay to my word. Nothing great has been nor will be created with a Wordpress core. Don't tell me how some great stuff has been achieved. Or wait, please do so. But before you do think about if that wouldn't been faster, cheaper, more reliable , etc... if done with a framework like symphony or laravel... or even zend or cake.

And that brings me back to the point:
Is cheap and "out of the box" really what you need and desire? As customer and as developer?

Currently on an internship, PHP mostly, little bit of Python and the usual web stuff, and I just had the BEST FUCKING DAY EVER.

Wake up and find out I'm out of coffee, oh boy here we go.

Bus leaves 10 minutes late, great gonna miss my train.

Trains just don't wanna ride today, back in a bus I go, what's normally a 10 minute train travel is now a 90 minute bus ride.

Arrive at internship, coffee machine is broke, non problem, I'll just lose it slowly.

NOW HERE COMES THE FUCKING GOOD PART!!

Alright, so I'm working on a CMS that can be used just about on any device you want, mobile or desktop, it's huge, billion's of rows of scientific data. Very specific requirements and low error margins. Now, yesterday I was really enjoying myself here until today, Project manager walks in, comes to my desk and hands me a Samsung Gear S3, an Apple watch and some cheap knockoff. He tells me that before the Friday deploy, THE ENTIRE CMS SHOULD WORK ON THOSE WATCHES!

I mean, don't get me wrong, I like a challenge but it's just not right, I mean, I'm still not sure what the right way to handle tables on phones is, but smart watches, just no. Besides that, I've never worked with any Apple devices, let alone WatchOs, nor have I worked with Android Wear.

Also, Project Manager is a total dickhead, he's the kinda guy that prefers a light theme, doesn't clean up his code, writes 0 documentation for an API, 1 space = tab, pure horror.

So after almost flipping my desk, I just called my school coach to announce I'm leaving this internship. After a brief explanation he decides to come over, and guess what, according to the Project Manager I wasn't supposed to do that, I was supposed to test if it would be possible.

FUCKING ASSFUCKFACE

More sysadmin focused but y’all get this stuff and I need a rant.

TLDR: Got the wrong internship.

Start working as a sysadmin/dev intern/man-of-many-hats at a small finance company (I’m still in school). Day 1: “Oh new IT guy? Just grab a PC from an empty cubicle and here’s a flash drive with Fedora, go ahead and manually install your operating system. Oh shit also your desktop has 2g of ram, a core2 duo, and we scavenged your hard drive for another dev so just go find one in the server room. And also your monitor is broken so just take one from another cubicle.”

Am shown our server room and see that someone is storing random personal shit in there (golf clubs propped against the server racks with heads mixed into the cabling, etc.). Ask why the golf clubs etc. are mixed in with the cabling and server racks and am given the silent treatment. Learn later that my boss is the owners son, and he is storing his personal stuff in our server room.

Do desktop support for end users. Another manager asks for her employees to receive copies of office 2010 (they’re running 2003 an 2007). Ask boss about licensing plans in place and upgrade schedules, he says he’ll get back to me. I explain to other manager we are working on a licensing scheme and I will keep her informed.

Next day other manager tells me (*the intern*) that she spoke with a rich business friend whose company uses fake/cracked license keys and we should do the same to keep costs down. I nod and smile. IT manager tells me we have no upgrade schedule or licensing agreement. I suggest purchasing an Office 365 subscription. Boss says $150 a year per employee is too expensive (Company pulls good money, has ~25 employees, owner is just cheap) I suggest freeware alternatives. Other manager refuses to use anything other than office 2010 as that is what she is familiar with. Boss refuses to spend any money on license keys. Learn other manager is owners wife and mother of my boss. Stalemate. No upgrades happen.

Company is running an active directory Windows Server 2003 instance that needs upgrading. I suggest 2012R2. Boss says “sure”. I ask how he will purchase the license key and he tells me he won’t.

I suggest running an Ubuntu server with LDAP functionality instead with the understanding that this will add IT employee hours for maintenance. Bosses eyes glaze over at the mention of Linux. The upgrade is put off.

Start cleaning out server room of the personal junk, labeling server racks and cables, and creating a network map. Boss asks what I’m doing. I show him the organized side of the server room and he says “okay but don’t do any more”.

... *sigh* ...

The list would be quite long.

I think Google is still making good tools, but just like Apple the integrations get all so tight and constricting... And with their data, if it goes wrong, it will go wrong hard.

I feel like YouTube is gliding into a state where cheap clickbait floats to the top and finding quality gets more difficult as well, their algorithm is more and more tuned to choose recent popular stuff over good older gems.

Microsoft is all pretend lovey dovey cuddling open source, but I'm still suspicious it's all a hug of death. I was never a big fan, but they're seriously dropping balls when it comes to windows-as-a-service, taking away so much personal control from end users even though they can't be trusted to babysit either.

Amazon is creeping it's way through the internet, charging $10/m to join the vip club infesting houses with spytubes to sell more plastic crap. Bezos' only right to keep wasting oxygen is BlueOrigin, but he'll probably fuck that up as well turning spaceflight into a decadent prime consumer orgy instead of something inspiring.

Facebook... Well, that's self explanatory. Fuck it, everything it pretends to be, and everyone who still has an account with a rusty spike.

Uber and AirBnB, with their fake ass mission of a green shared economy, but they trample over employees, customers and neighbors to build their ivory towers of progressive illusions.

Then there's a million declining brands.

I liked Skype for example when it was first released, Just like how I started out liking (and then hating) Discord, Slack, etc... They're all tools which seem fast and easy, but then they get us further away from solid protocols, get us entrenched into limiting, bloated and sometimes even dangerous tools. As my dad used to say: "Companies are like women, if you go for cheap, fast and easy you'll end up with a burning dick and half your savings gone"

You know what, fuck all tech companies.

OK, devrant is still pretty nice... For now.

Hello there, just couple of words about PHP. I've been develop on PHP more than 10 years, I've seen it all 3,4,5,{6},7. Yes PHP was not good in terms of engineering and patterns, but it was simple, it was the most simple language for web to start those days. It was simple as you put code into file, upload it via FTP and it works. No java servlets, no unix consoles, no nothing, just shared hosting account was enough to host site, or even application with database. As database everybody used to have mysql, again because its simple to start and easy to maintain. So PHP+MySQL became industry standard on Web during 00-2012, and continues in some way.
You can write HTML and logic inside single file, within php code, even more single file may content few pages, or even kind of framework. That simplicity and agility sticks everybody who wants to develop sites with PHP.
This is pretty much about why it is so popular.

Each good or wannabe PHP developer in an early days write its own framework or library (like in javascript this days because of nodejs)

Imagine that PHP has hadn't have package manager, developers used to have host packages on their own sites, then various packages catalog sites created, and then finally composer. A gazillions of php code had spread over internet, without any kind of dependency control. To include libraries to your projects you have to just write include, or require. Some developers do it better than others.

So what we have ? A lots of code, no repositories, zip archives with libraries, no dependency control.
Project that uses that kind of code are still alive even today, they are solid hose of cards, and unmaintainable of course.

And main question that I'm trying to answer is Why PHP is not good ?
- First is amount of legacy code which people copy and pasted into their project, spread it even more like a virus.
- Lack of industry standards at the beginning lead to a lots of bad practices among developers. PHP code usually smells.
open source php projects in early days was developed in same conditions so even in phpbb, phpnuke, wordpress, drupal used to have a lot of bad practices in their codebase. So php developers usually not study by another library, instead they write their own frameworks/libraries.
- "It works", - there are no strong business demands, on web development, again because lack of standards, and concerns.
This three things are basically same, they linked to each other and summarize of answer of why PHP have strong smells and everybody yelling against it.

Whats is with PHP nowadays ? Of course PHP today is more influenced by good practice of webdev. Composer, Zend, Laravel, Yii, Symphony and language it self became more adult so to say, but developers...

People who never tried anything except PHP are usually weaker in programming and ecosystem knowledge than people who tried something else, python, perl, ruby, c for instance.

Summary

PHP as any other programming language is a tool. Each tool has its own task. Consider this and your task requirements and PHP can be just good enough solution.
"PHP is shit" - usually you heard that from people who never write strong applications on PHP and haven't used any good tools like Symphony or Laravel.
Cheap developers, - the bigger community, the more chance to hire cheap developers, and more chance to get bad code. That can be applied on any other language.
PHP has professionals developers, usually they have not only php on scope.

That's all folks, this is very brief, I am not covering php usage early days in details, but this is good enough to understand the point.

Enjoy.

How my keyboard evolves:

0. Like any normal man, I started with a cheap standard Qwerty keyboard. As I began learning programming, I wanted something more elegant, so...

1. I've been using layout Dvorak (and then Programmer Dvorak) for like 5 years+ now. Anyone has intention to type on my machine soon gives up or even is blocked by me from the very start. It always takes a couple of minutes to explain to them what's going on here. They think I'm weird. I feel untouchable :)

2. My first mechkey was a 104-key Filco. Time flew by and I wanted my thing to be more compact so I went for a 66% and a TKL.

3. Recently I find out that though my keyboard is not a full-sized, there're yet some keys I've never touched (the bottom right modifiers, scroll lock, etc), so I look for a leaner one: HHKB and its alike but with slight remappings. Now I'm satisfied with the tiny, corners-trimmed keyboard but others look at it and ask how it is even possible to scroll the web page using the thing.

Prob 1: my boss can never type on my keyboard. Sometimes he still grumbles when he cannot correct my fouls right on my machine.

Prob 2: my keyboards at home and at work are not the same and some keymapping cannot applied to one of the two. That's async.

I built a tracking suite for our fleet of printers quite some time ago. Once a day, "bizteam" (aka sales) gets an alert detailing how many printers are in critical need of attention (out of paper, mechanical error, etc.), and how many of them are flat-out offline. They don't seem to care. I mean they do, I think? but. the offline percentage hasn't changed much in the past month or two.

These printers constitute a primary part of our business model and... screw it. they're goddamn important, okay?

A full 16% of our printers are OFFLINE. Most of those HAVE BEEN OFFLINE FOR 3 FUCKING MONTHS.

3% of our printers have been online BUT OUT OF PAPER FOR OVER A MONTH.

and what really baffles me...
We've convinced a few of these merchants to actually plug in their goddamn printers. (and yes, they actually *paid* for these things, and they're absolutely not cheap.) Some of those were previously both offline AND out of paper, yet after being plugged in, they're *STILL* OUT OF PAPER?! What the crap, people! It's a printer! it's not difficult! It's the same as every other fucking printer you have! and it's probably the same goddamn fucking model!

Did AlexDeLarge skullfuck your brain into mush? FIX YOUR SHIT!

My laptop started making faint high-pitched noises - I hope I misheard and it's actually just some coil singing inside the power-supply and not one of the disks/something else - also, I seem to have dropped 4GB of RAM suddenly where there should be 8GB.

(Also, I should really wipe the messed up dual-boot still residing on disk from last semester and replace it by a fresh arch-only install. (No time and joy in debugging that right now.) Probably something for tomorrow evening.)

The device is ~8 years old by now and starting to fall apart - nothing duct tape can't fix - but I'm somewhat worried about the rest right now. D:

Meh, I really need that laptop during the next two weeks, I just hope the hardware doesn't die on me in the meantime because I can't wait for an order to arrive, let alone afford some cheap replacement.

!dev

So the ceiling in our (upstairs) laundry room started leaking. After some troubleshooting, we determined it was the A/C, and not the water pipes. (The house is cheap as hell and fucking stupid.) We did some troubleshooting and research, and tried fixing it ourselves; no luck. Cleaning the pipes from outside: no joy. Cleaning the pipes from inside: no access. The attic is ... small. Maybe half a small closet? and doesn’t give access to fucking anything. The builders must have installed everything before putting up the walls and ceilings, sealing everything off, because there is no access. It’s fucking stupid. Also, the usual maintenance openings aren’t even there either because why the fuck would they be?

But fucking whatever.

We called an a/c repair guy, who never showed. We assumed he was busy (it’s fucking hot), so we called him again the next day; two days later he showed.

Busy. Whatever.

Guy didn’t bring a ladder. Whatever, we have one right there in the hallway because we’ve been trying in vain to fix it.

Guy didn’t bring a wrench of any kind. Guy didn’t bring a screwdriver. Guy didn’t bring a bucket. Guy didn’t bring any pipe. Or any pipe sealant. Or fucking anything but his sagging fucking pants, fat belly, and fat stench. We had to supply everything, which fortunately we had on hand as we were already trying to fix it. Hoorah for being proactive.

Guy said he drained both primary and secondary pans. Somehow. Without access. I’m not even convinced it HAS a secondary pan. Guy said he cleaned out the pipes, too. From inside the house. Without access. Somehow. Maybe he did that from outside, without tools, while I was chasing the brats and someone else was watching the fat bastard. Who knows; I wasn’t with him most of the time.

When he was done, the guy said “pay whatever you think it’s worth” (or whatever). Fine, if he actually cleaned the pipes out and it isn’t leaking anymore, that’s great.

Guy leaves.

We go up to check. AND THE FUCKING A/C IS STILL LEAKING. BUT NOW IT’S FROM BEFORE THE PIPES, TOO. AND HALF AN HOUR LATER, THE LAUDRY ROOM CEILING IS ALSO LEAKING, WHICH MEANS THE PIPES ARE STILL LEAKING.

It turns out the asshole broke the pan.

We call him back, he goes blah blah blah, we send him a video. Drip, drip, drip.

His response?
“The pan must be rusted.” IT’S FUCKING PLASTIC.

“Oh, in that case, it’s probably a rusted coil that’s leaking.”

a) HOW DID YOU NOT KNOW IT WAS FUCKING PLASTIC IF YOU DRAINED IT?

b) THE COILS CARRY FREON, NOT WATER, AND THE A/C IS STILL WORKING. IF THERE WAS A LEAK, SHIT WOULD BE HOT. AND RANK. FREON SMELLS NASTY AND DOESN’T CAUSE IT TO RAIN IN THE FUCKING HOUSE.

REPLACING A COIL IS ALSO A $2000 FUCKING REPAIR.

THE FAT BASTARD PROBABLY BROKE THE PAN INTENTIONALLY JUST TO UPSELL. I WANT TO FUCKING MURDER HIS LYING FUCKING FACE OFF.

It’s possible he didn’t break the pan intentionally, so I’ll tentatively remove that from his charges. BUT TO FUCKING LIE?

LIE AND DIE, FUCKER.

Just disassembled 2 €5 desk fans because they were shit.. and so is their design apparently.

What I found inside was actually surprisingly simple.. a toddler could build it. It's just a DC motor, a 3PDT switch, DC barrel connector, some wires and screws to hold stuff in place. Oh and the plastic thingie with the fan blades, as well as the USB cable of course.

5 fucking euros. The combined cost of the components would be less than 3, certified motherfuckturers. Time to build it, injection moulding, transportation, sure.. but still.

And if you think that being salty about €5 is cheap shittalk, expand that to every fucking piece of electronics that doesn't cost a small fortune.. at all price ranges. Could be radios, alarm clocks, heck even phones. Shit's way too expensive for what it's worth. Perhaps because so many people in the industry are just here for a quick buck.. motherfuckers 😒

Anyway, back to the design.. the hole in the fan blade thingie is supposed to get the motor's shaft shafted in, to turn the blades. I'd use glue there.. but not these designers. They just shove it in and hope that friction takes care of everything. And one of the fan blade modules' hole was so wide that inserting the motor is like throwing a sausage down the hallway. No contact at all! Make it tight already like the Chinese designer's glory-...
Nah let's not get into Chinese tightness just yet.

Oh and also a resistor for slow mode. Consumes just as much power except the fan turns slower. Because fuck efficiency, right?

Goddammit, next time I'm just gonna build my own again.. at least that wouldn't be a certified piece of shit 😑

Crappy day, entirely related to cars and trucks and other wheeled implements of doom and annoyance.

My car died this morning.
It has been slowly dying for weeks in a very unusual way (something electrical; we're not sure what), but today it finally gave up and just wouldn't start anymore.

We replaced the crap battery (it had been a crap freebie from my parents), which fixed the not-starting issue for now, but it still has lots of other problems. Fluid leaks, disintegrating paint, some lights suddenly or randomly not working, super long clutch distance, sporadic grinding sounds, shifter randomly not engaging, pieces literally falling off, bits of the interior breaking (like the driver's side door handle), the wiper sprayers bloody missing the windshield, etc., etc., etc. My poor, poor car. It was super cheap, and I've had it for a long time, so I'm not surprised, but. I love my car, so it makes me really sad. ☹

Anyway, we finally got the car starting again, and I drove to work about four hours late. I had worked super late the previous night (11:45pm), and had let my boss know already, so whatever.

As for the trip, I work ~40 minutes away, and with the poor quality of drivers here there's usually something dumb happening. Today... well. Today was one of the bad days.

Someone was in the fast lane doing 50mph. The usual speed of traffic is 80mph. They got annoyed whenever someone passed them. Minor, but worth including.

Later on, people slowed way down and gawked at... a port-a-potty. Seriously, a port-a-potty. It was on the shoulder where there had been some construction, so it's not surprising or anything. People seriously dropped from 80mph down to 20mph just to stare at this thing, and it wasn't even occupied or anything. It was just a port-a-potty! There was nothing else around! What could possibly be so interesting?!

There was also a random Penske (moving) truck doing 35mph on the freeway holding up traffic like 10 minutes later; no idea why. Traffic usually does ~70mph there. No blinkers or anything, it was just being slow and causing everyone to go around in a pretty traffic-heavy area.

The truck in front of me for ~40% of the trip kept waiting way too long to stop, and would then slam on the breaks. I almost hit him twice because of this, and I couldn't see around him, either. It was some giant pickup staying just in the wrong spot. I ended up driving partially in the shoulder so I could gauge when to stop by the car in front of him. He slammed on the breaks like twelve more times before he finally left. Jerk.

The same thing happened again like 85% of the way to work, but this time it was a different pickup, and there was a semi was behind me, which obviously couldn't stop very quickly. Fortunately for both of us, there was a gap in traffic to my right, so I slipped out of the way before getting squished. ><

Bloody hell.
Today has not been fun.

Nobody flipping me off or was doing their damnedest to prevent me from changing lanes today, though, so I suppose it could have been worse. Also I didn't die, so there's that.

I need to make a confession about my terribly unprofessional project I made. Around two years ago I got thrown for the first time into back end development - I had to work on the project alone. As a very smart man I basically exposed our SMTP server as a nice and very flexible API.

Fortunately it was, by the design, a very short-lived project, taken down from the web completely and for good after around 2 months. I'm still happy I had more luck than brains and nobody used our server as a spam sending service in our name and I have learned a valuable and relatively cheap lesson in security this way.

Do you know when you think "Oh that doesn't look too hard. I bet I can do it in no time"?
That is how I felt when I saw the DIY 3D printer kit Anet A8. It's only 150€ on gearbest so that is pretty cheap.
The reviews said it takes about 3 - 4 hours to build and I though "Ok I am a computer specialist and engineer so 3h sounds reasonable".
When I bought it from gearbest the first problems started: 5 days after the estimated shipping date the packet was still not on its way. After I fucked the support up, it finally arrived 3 weeks after the estimated date.
When I took the first look, everything seemed to be fine except for some small scratches but for that price that is not a problem.
So I started to build the printer at about 14:00 and even if some random sites in the manual were in Chinese I felt confident to get it done in a view hours.
And then it started to get really fucked. The first problem was that 2 screws were unusable and I had to use my own screws instead. The next problem was that the manual was just in the wrong fucking order at some points and I had to reverse multiple steps to get it right.
But the most fucked up thing: There should have been 2 threaded rods with a length of 345mm but the rods had a length of 310mm which was nowhere listed in the parts list. So I had to go buy some aluminium rods to fill the gap temporary so that I can at least go on with the build before getting a replacement. And I could go on and on and with the problems but the point is, it is now 19:30 which is about 5.5 hours after I started and I am still not fucking done with this.

So what have I learned?
Cheap Chinese hardware is good, but only as long as you don't have to assemble that shit yourself.

Fuck. I can't take this shit anymore.

There was a project where we had to implement third-party system for government agency processes management. For some reason, probably because my work is cheap for my boss, the task was assigned to me. Just as a reminder, I'm a .NET Dev. Zero experience in server management. Zero experience in external services implementation.

Anyway, system producent, also an government agency, got angry, becasue they can only earn money on implementation. They have to give the software to other agencies for free. Because of that I've got client program, incomplete documentation and broken scripts for database creation. It took me 2 months to get it all to work but at the end client was happy, my boss got paid and I've got 500 PLN (~130 USD) bonus.

Everything was fine for a while, but after a month server has started freezing everyday, some time before 7 am. The only way I found to make it work again was to restore snapshot made everyday at 10 pm. For a month I was waking up earlier and restored snapshot, and after that my boss took it upon himself. I tried few times to find a bug and fix it, but to no effect. Even person with much more experience with it tried to help but also couldn't find anything.

My solution? Copy all the data and configuration, create new machine, copy everything and check if the problem persists. If not, kill old server. Client won't even notice. But nooooooooo... It would cost my boss a bit of money and I'd need to work on it and he can't let it be, because I'm the only developer working on his flagship product. He'd rather wake up everyday and restore snapshot. Okay, as you wish.

And today, finally, everything went downhill. Snapshot wasn't created, server froze, backup can't be created. Nothing can be done. Client is furious, because they have had reported this problem and a few times restoration was too late and they couldn't work. No one knows how to fix it, I'm not working today (I'm still studying and am available only 2 days) and situation is really shitty.

BUT SURE. ITS BETTER TO RESTORE SERVER EVERYDAY THAN JUST FUCKING FIX IT.

Oh, also, there's no staging or any other real backup. We have snapshots for each day and that's that. Boss' order. Why do I even care...

Been a while but I'm back with fresh rants.

If you look in my history you will see support wanted us devs to start paying for writing bugs. Now the release presentation has passed but we're still in crunch time because we can't put clients onto the new version yet. And in the meantime our coffee machine broke. So support has started to manually pour coffee, which was actual real nice of them.

Now yesterday I'm in a hurry and the coffee is out so I decide to pour a quick cup for myself with the leftover grounds. When I'm back at my desk I get a call asking if I just made coffee. I'm like yeah something wrong? Proceed to get chewed out for being selfish and that they see how it is with me, then get hung up on before I can even explain.

So yeah not only is my company too cheap to get a new machine, the lack of one causes drama.

Today however our network guy, who was present when my colleagues asked what was with the weird phone call, brought in his own machine and let me have coffee from it. Meanwhile suport can keep their crappy manual pouring. And I don't need to go into their office anymore.

You know the worst thing about being a freelancer? You're expected to wear every fucking hat and you don't get normal hours.

Over the past few days I have been working with a client of a client attampting to fix his server. He's running CentOS on VMWare and somehow ended up breaking the system.

Upon inspection there was no way to fix his system remotely. It wouldn't even boot in recovery mode. So we've been attempting to recover his data so that we can reinstall CentOS and not have to start completely from scratch.

So for the past 3 days straight I have been remotely logging in to a Debian Live CD and manually sending folders to a FTP server of his. He has somewhere close to 30 sites on this server, and upwards of 1 million files in total.

Yesterday either the system freaked out or he did something, but the entire fucking system stopped responding which forced me to reboot it, reinsert the live CD, reinstall evertything, and re-mount his broken systems drives.

Here we are 3 days in, we're still not done, and I'm getting slightly pissy because if you don't know Linux well enough to fix this shit yourself, you shouldn't be acting as your own sysadmin for 30+ sites.

Also, backups are a thing right? VMWare also has snapshots. I know the extra storage isn't cheap, but it's a hell of a lot cheaper than paying soemone like me $35/hr to go and fix all of your shitty mistakes.

I hate the old people in my company. FUCK THEM!

First I'm telling you a bit about me, so my story makes sense. I'm currently employed as IT-Tecnician in a Helpdesk as 1st & 2nd Level Supporter. I'm working for the current company since 2 years and already sweat too much Blood and Tears for the Old farts.

Now to the Story:
I'm currently planing to make a three year study as IT-Business Engineer, because I was orginally a Real Estate and Account Manager. That is the highest schoolar degree I can currently get in IT with my background. After that I would get the pass for BSc or CAS.

Two years ago when I took the Job I told them, that I would like to start my study in the next two years. Back then they agreed and told me, they will support me.

After that I got a very good reputation in the company and also took part in projects, coded plugins and evaluated requierments for programms. I got still payd with a low Supporter income for my work.

In february this year I told them I want to start my study in May. They boss told me I should do a way lower degree for two years and go into infastructur segment. I told him that my wished degree would be higher and also include infrastructur. Boss told me, that I will need to prostpone my study a third time to autumn.

The reality is, that they want to underpay me as supporter and keep me without a degree. I should keep working on projects, which a high degree tecnician does and gets better payd. In everyway thats unfair and just a hit into my gut. They try to ruin my career and keep me cheap.

The joke is, the boss is over 50 years old and is egostic as fuck. He just wants to profit from my knowledge and wont pay me for it.

I already got the knowledge and just need to have a higher IT degree, so I get payd a fair sum for my work.

My only option is to quit the company or stay as a lowly supporter.

Even my other coworkers asked me, why I'm still a supporter with my knowledge. When I told them my story, they all shugg there heads and told me, I should get the degree.

Just another big rant story full of WTFs and completely true.

The company I work for atm is like the landlord for a big german city. We build houses and flats and rent them to normal people, just that we want to be very cheap and most nearly all our tenants are jobless.
So the company hired a lot of software-dev-companies to manage everything.

The company I want to talk about is "ABI...", a 40-man big software company. ABI sold us different software, e.g. a datawarehouse for our ERP System they "invented" for 300K or the software we talk about today: a document management system. It has workflows, a 100 year-save archive system, a history feature etc.
The software itself, called ELO (you can google it if you want) is a component based software in which every company that is a "partner" can develop things into, like ABI did for our company.

Since 2013 we pay ABI 150€ / hour (most of the time it feels like 300€ / hour, because if you want something done from a dev from ABI you first have to talk to the project manager of him and of course pay him too). They did thousand of hours in all that years for my company.

In 2017 they started to talk about a module in ELO called Invoice-Module. With that you can manage all your paper invoices digital, like scan that piece of paper, then OCR it, then fill formular data, add data and at the end you can send it to the ERP system automatically and we can pay the invoice automatically. "Digitization" is the key word.

After 1.5 years of project planning and a 3 month test phase, we talked to them and decided to go live at 01.01.2019. We are talking about already ~ 200 hours planning and work just from ABI for this (do the math. No. Please dont...).

I joined my actual company in October 2018 and I should "just overview" the project a bit, I mean, hey, they planned it since 1.5 years - how bad can it be, right?

In the first week of 2019 we found 25 bugs and users reporting around 50 feature requests, around 30 of them of such high need that they can't do their daily work with the invoices like they did before without ELO.
In the first three weeks of 2019 we where around 70 bugs deep, 20 of them fixed, with nearly 70 feature requests, 5 done. Around 10 bugs where so high, that the complete system would not work any more if they dont get fixed.

Want examples?
- Delete a Invoice (right click -> delete, no super deep hiding menu), and the server crashed until someone restarts it.
- missing dropdown of tax rate, everything was 19% (in germany 99,9% of all invoices are 19%, 7% or 0%).

But the biggest thing was, that the complete webservice send to ERP wasn't even finished in the code.
So that means we had around 600 invoices to pay with nearly 300.000€ of cash in the first 3 weeks and we couldn't even pay 1 cent - as a urban company!

Shortly after receiving and starting to discussing this high prio request with ABI the project manager of my assigned dev told me he will be gone the next day. He is getting married. And honeymoon. 1 Week. So: Wish him luck, when will his replacement here?

Deep breath.
Deep breath.

There was no replacement. They just had 1 developer. As a 40-people-software-house they had exactly one developer which knows ELO, which they sold to A LOT of companies.

He came back, 1 week gone, we asked for a meeting, they told us "oh, he is now in other ELO projects planned, we can offer you time from him in 4 weeks earliest".

To cut a long story short (it's to late for that, right?) we fought around 3 month with ABI to even rescue this project in any thinkable way. The solution mid February was, that I (software dev) would visit crash courses in ELO to be the second developer ABI didnt had, even without working for ABI....

Now its may and we decided to cut strings with ABI in ELO and switch to a new company who knows ELO. There where around 10 meetings on CEO-level to make this a "good" cut and not a bad cut, because we can't afford to scare them (think about the 300K tool they sold us...).

01.06.2019 we should start with the new company. 2 days before I found out, by accident, that there was a password on the project file on the server for one of the ELO services. I called my boss and my CEO. No one knows anything about it. I found out, that ABI sneaked into this folder, while working on another thing a week ago, and set this password to lock us out. OF OUR OWN FCKING FILE.
Without this password we are not able to fix any bug, develop any feature or even change an image within ELO, regardless, that we paid thausend of hours for that.

When we asked ABI about this, his CEO told us, it is "their property" and they will not remove it.
When I asked my CEO about it, they told me to do nothing, we can't scare them, we need them for the 300K tool.

No punt.
No finish.

Just the project file with a password still there today

- booting Linux
- starting Clonezilla
- kernel panic after some time
- WTF, this used to work
- look at sensor values
- CPU is really hot
- CPU fan doesn't work
- BIOS warning disabled because the lowest regular fan level is 0 RPM

Luckily, I still had some cheap 120mm fan which is a bit louder, but works. What's astonishing is that in normal operation, i.e. without full load, the case fans alone provided enough air stream for the CPU cooler.

!dev, !rant
Flew to Berlin for the weekend. Kinda disappointed xD
Trash everywhere, water costs more then my kidney, ugly communist blocks and buildings everywhere(I mean, yeah, sure: GDR, but like what, did nobody build anything since then? lol), almost nothing to eat .-. (I don't think we encountered even a single "german food" place walking around Berlin)

On the flip side, roads are awesome, no construction everywhere that blocks half the roads, no cracks everywhere and the asphalt doesn't make you vibrate when you ride over it. People were nice and polite, I didn't get the overwhelming urge in stores/stalls to just place everything back on the shelves and fuck off just from talking to a cashier/clerk/worker. Food, drinks, and services were cheap as fuck(Except for water, which I'm still coping seething and malding over, I thought the "Beer cheaper than water" was a joke, or an idiom, not fucking reality).

Also got to see @Ranchonyx IRL <3
So that was the highlight of the vacation.

Sooooo I got new RAM for my low-budget server today.

Now introducing: 24 GB DDR2 RAM

XD yes I know DDR 2 is slow but very, very cheap ECC memory.

(still not enough for Chrome)

Lels

Before I was unceremoniously laid off by a shit company in which they tried to blame shit on me I was working on a opencv implementation of a proprietary document scanner.

I finished the Android prototype and was working on the ios implementation. It was left unfinished in the ios version because I was building it in swift and obj c to compare code bases.

They launched a shit unfinished Android app of their product without the scanner (they could not add the scanner lels) and have not been able to do shit on the ios version.

I did not give them the Android prototype. There was no binding contract that specified that what I developed was theirs. There is no record of anything.

The scanner? Is still in my phone and I still have the built project in my mac.
Unless them cheap assholes decide to pay another engineer for the opencv implementation, their vbscript php non theory knowing shit lead will have to figure out the required mat obj c swift java cpp code needed to build it.

Top kek

I don't get why nowadays people still buy smartphones with battery capacity between 2500mAh and 3500mAh meanwhile there are cheap enough smartphones with fricking 5000mAh(or more)!

Typing from 3 day averagely lasting smartphone, with my use.

More than 3GB ram is useless on android phones. Change my mind.

I bought cheap lg g5. It has 4gb ram (my old phone had 1gb ram). I have opened chrome with 4 tabs, an AAA game, devRant, Instagram, a vpn app, android settings and I'm listening music. There is still free 1,2 gb ram. Also this is not my everyday usage. I use maximum 3 apps at same time.

Worst and only experience is the reason I moved away from programming...
25 years ago I was hired to copy a phone book list to a access database.
Access back then would create lots of garbage, so I would add 3 to 5 entries before access crashed (shitty p133 laptop with 32mb ram running windows 98.
So I made a visual basic program to add data and work around the problem.
I offered said program to the guy really cheap and would still make it better.
Did also a admin module since he had hired dozens of people and I knew he would have problems peasing the databases together.
And... Dude cancels the deal.
I get a job, 2 weeks later he calls me... Ohhh I don't know how to get all the databases together...
Me: I'm working now, the program I did solved said problem. I trew the code away. Deal with it.

So, I'm the only developer in a marketing firm. I was asked to develop the company website. The deadline was within a month. A full on CMS. When I was interviewed I told them that I'm more fluent in back-end development rather than UI design etc. So the company's designer started designing the website. Incomplete designs were given to me one week before the due date. I'm a fresh grad so I'm relatively new. So I used a website builder knowing that I can't code the whole CMS within a week. I asked them which they gave approval to knowing it was $16 a month.
I started making it using webflow. 2 pages in, I asked them to pay for the subscription because webflow allows 2-3 pages for the free version. When the time to pay came, they were like, "wow, $16? That's a lot every month for just a website". Keep in mind, it's not that they don't have the money. Just cheap. This was like 5 days before the deadline and they said it's too expensive and asked me to code everything by myself. And gave an extension for a few months.
I said okay and started development. I said we would still need to spend on a cloud instance for deployment which would be like $6 monthly. My manager asked me is there a way to not pay monthly and pay like $100 and get one for lifetime. I facepalmed so hard. I tried explaining to him cloud-server costs are either monthly/yearly or pay-per-use basis. He told me maybe because I'm new I don't know and go to do some research on it. I researched and the only solution was to buy a server which costs $100++ monthly. I sent him the costs in a document which he did not even bother to read.

That was back in November last year. Fast forward to February. I've coded the website thrice. The design keeps changing every week. The design is still not complete. And they are saying I'm not eligible for a promotion because the website is still not done. It pisses me the fuck off. It's not my fault it's not done. The designers haven't done the design, the manager can't decide on shit. I'm just here because it's my first job out of uni and I thought it might be a good experience, but honestly right now the way they are treating me it pisses me off.

Been stuck with a fucking 13mbit internet connection shared between three people for the past seven years. Lived cheap in a nice location, so it was worth it, still frustrating af. Finally moved, new city, new place, new internet. Currently sitting on 300mbit at home. Downloaded update for car nav, 25gb, took about 15 minutes, where it would previously have taken all day. Feels fucking good man.

Our team - if ever existed - is falling apart. Pressure raising. Release deadline probably failing. No release ready for Big Sur.

Almost seemed we were getting somewhere: More focus on code quality, unit tests, proper design, smaller classes. But somehow we now ended up in "microservice" hell; a gazillion classes, mostly tested in isolation, but together they just fail to do their job. A cheap and dirty proof of concept from March is still more capable than this pile. I really start to doubt all that "Clean code", TDD, Agility rhetorics. What does it help you, if nobody cares for the end result? It's like a month I try to hammer down that message: we have to have testable artifacts, we have to ensure code signing works, our artifact is packaged and installable, we have to give QA something they can test - but time just passes and this piece of shit software is still being killed or does nothing.

Now my knee is broken and can do no sports and are tied to my chair even more. To top it all my coffee machine broke and my internet connection was abysmal this week. Not the usual small disconnects, after which it would recover, but more annoying and enduring: often being throttled to 1.7 MB/s (ranking my connection in the slowest 7% even in Germany). My RDP sessions had compression artifacts all over the screen and a mouse click would only take effect 5 sec later.

But my Esspresso machine was just repaired. Not all hope is lost.

I have a cheap crappy drone and while not using it I hang it on the smoke detector. Neither the drone or the smoke alarm have batteries.

I glance up and see a light flashing, freak out, shoot the drone...lights still flashing and I realize it's the smoke detector. Fuck that, there's no batteries. I shoot the smoke alarm and it explodes...battery lands at my feet still intact...

...the alarm is dead, the drone is crying, the toaster is laughing and I can't figure out why the fuck I shot my drone and smoke detector but the toaster doesn't phase me.

(Some of this is actually true)

So a few weeks back guy I used to work with contacts me for some dev work on a UK project he is working on, it's the Thursday and they need the thing the coming Monday. I tell him it's totally impossible, and it was so he asks what can done and how much, as well as how much for the entire project.

I stipulate exactly what can be done, with exclusions and say 7.5k and them mail over a detailed quote for 30k for everything.

I get told it's all fine, I must go ahead. I get through a bit more than expected by the Monday, but they still needed something to demo and I set I can get enough for demo in place by Thursday.

They demo to business and money and all that and everyone is happy and tell me to finish up along with some changes, and I don't even adjust the price as it was more work they wanted outside of the original spec.

Get to probably 80% done and they say we need to pause they need to look over other feedback.

Next thing, the PM come back, no they were never actually happy with the quote and they found some other guy willing to do the entire thing for 7.5k and they willing to only give me that for the code I have written so far. Cunts.

Anyway, he tries to take some blame for it, even though I know it's BS and says he will pay in another 7.5k from his share if I am willing and we call it quits.

This people, is why I don't freelance.

I feel sorry for this new kid, he clearly under quoted, and yes I am expensive, but with decades experience having worked on international projects for one of the largest digital asset management firms, my countries leading fintech dev house and now the lead developer for my countries largest insurance software dev house, you damn fucking strait my free time comes at a premium, as you are getting top fucking quality, 100% tested, high performing code.

They can go fuck an entire flock of ducks when they come back after this half ling fucks up the diamond I coded up for them.

Even funnier, they a UK based company, so for them this was a 1.5k project. Cheap cunts.

I became storage addicted… started with a 240 GB SSD + a 2 TB HDD... two years later added a new 1 TB SSD, a few months later when the HDD died changed it with a 4 TB one… a few days later I bought a 10 TB NAS (80% off on Amazon, too cheap not to buy).

Now I have 15.24 TB and still thinking about changing that 240 GB SSD with a 2 TB one.

I need help.

Last job search was in mid 2020. I thought I had a pretty good offer: getting 40% more in gross salary. But then I asked some pretty standard/clarifying questions about benefits and all the red flags started coming out 🚩. They really used the pandemic to sell ppl short. TLDR I turned down the offer.

PTO was the dealbreaker. Their PTO was 16 days: 6 holidays plus 10 personal days. Even though any paid time off is PTO, I thought it was pretty gross to count holidays in the PTO bank like that. My friends agreed with me.

Yes, this is a US company.

Then shit hit the fan when I asked about sick days.

Me: What’s the policy on sick time?

Talent/HR: We have a flex time policy, so you don’t have to take time off for a one hour doctor’s appointment.

🤨🚩
I didn’t ask about flex time.

Me: The PTO is really low.

Talent: Well, you could use your sick days for vacation.

🤨🚩🚩

Me: I just asked you about sick time and you didn’t mention sick days. What are these sick days?

Talent: Oh, well technically the personal days are 5 sick days and 5 personal days… [I swear this is what I heard over the phone.]

🤨🚩🚩🚩

Me: 😤 This isn’t going to work.

Talent: I can see about getting you more PTO.

Talent comes back with 5 additional personal days. And it wouldn’t be included in my offer letter it would only be a note in my file. 🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩

The gross thing was this startup was in the healthcare space: it’s a prescription meds delivery service/pharmacy. I know ppl say startups are the “throw money at you and go cheap on benefits” type. But how can you be in a healthcare space and not give ppl decent PTO? And during the pandemic and pre-vaccine existence? They were trying to con me. It was bizarre because it’s not my first job search. I was still employed so I wanted a new job but I wasn’t desperate.

I couldn’t see how anyone would accept that abysmal PTO offer. Maybe if they were really desperate or naive. I suspected this company had a big PTO disparity because I’m positive most employees would have negotiated for more time.

It was hard to turn down the money because I was afraid of not finding a job. Luckily, I did get an offer with really great benefits from a different company later on.

Not really a rant and not very random. More like a very short story.

So I didn't write any rant regarding the whole Microsoft GitHub topic. I don't like to judge stuff quickly. I participated in few threads though.

Another thing is I also don't use GitHub very much apart from giving 🌟 to repos as a bookmark. Have one hobby project there. That's all. So I don't worry that much. I'm that selfish and self concerned. :3

I was first introduced to version control system by learning how to use tortoisesvn around 2008. We had a group project and one of the guys was an experienced and amazing programmer unlike the rest of us. He was doing commercial projects while we were at our 1st and 2nd year. Uni had svn repo server. He taught us about tortoisesvn. He also had Basecamp and taught us how to use it as well. So that's how I learned the benefits of using versioning tools and project management tools. On side note, our uni didn't teach any of those in detail :3

After that project, I was hooked to use versioning tools. So until school kicked me out, I was able to use their svn server. When I was on my own, I had to ask Google for help. I found a new world. There are still free svn services that I can use with certain limited functions. That's not the new world; I found people saying how git is better than svn in various ways. It was around 2010,2011.

At first I was a bit reluctant to touch git because of all the commands in terminal approach. But then I found that there is tortoisegit. I still thank tortoisesvn creator for that. I'm a sucker for GUI tools. So then I also have to pick which git servers to use. Hell yeah, self hosted gitlab is the way to go man. Well that's what the internet said. So I listened. I got it up and running after numerous trial and error. I used it briefly. Then I came back to my country on 2012-2013; the land of kilobytes per minute (yes not second, minute).

My country's internet was improved only after 2016. So from 2013 to 2016, I did my best not to rely on internet. I wasn't able to afford a server at my less than 10 people, 12ft*50ft office. So I had to find alternative to gitlab which preferably run on windows. Found bonobo and it was alright. It worked. Well had crazy moments here and there when the PC running Bonobo got virus and stuff. But we managed. We survived. Then finally multi national Telecom corporates came to our country.

We got cheaper and faster mobile data, broadband and fiber plans. Finally I can visit pornhub ... sorry github. Github is good. I like it. But that doesn't mean I should share my ugly mutated projects to the rest of the world. I could keep using Bonobo but it has risks. So I had to think for an alternative. I remembered that gitlab didn't have cloud hosting service when I checked them out in the past. So I just looked into Bitbucket and happy with their free plans of 5 users and unlimited private repos. I am very very cheap and broke.

That's why I said I don't really care that much about the whole M$GitHub topic at the beginning. However due to that topic, I have visited GitLab website again and found out they have cloud hosting now and their free plan is unlimited users and unlimited repos. So hell yeah. Sorry BB. I am gonna move to cheaper and wider land.

TL;DR : I am gonna move to GitLab because of their free plan.

I recently tried to apply the same data analytics rationale that I use at work to my personal life. This is not a rant, it is more like an data storytelling of an actual use case I would like some input on.

I set a goal - gotta thin up a bit and calm down my ticker - and got a (almost unreasonably expensive) field expert consultant to yell at me about it for a couple hours.

I unravel the metrics - there is like a million weight-related KPIs and most say nothing at all. I have never seen an non-infrastructure measurable subject that could not be resumed to 2-5 performance metrics. I got overall weight, how well my nine-years-old business suit fits me, heart rate, and day-after relative muscle pain (it will make sense soon).

Then its data-pipeline time. I bought a cheap weight scale and smartwatch, and every morning I input the data in an app. Yes, I try to put on the suit every morning. It still does not fit.

After establishing a baseline, I tried to fit different approaches. Doing equipment-free exercises, going to the gym, dieting. None was actually feasible in the long run, but trying different approaches does highlight the impacts and the handling profile of each method.

Looking at the now-gathered data, one thing was obvious - can't do dieting because it is not doable to have a shopping list and meals for me and another for the family.
Gym is also off the table - too much overhead. I spend more time on the trip there and back than actually there.
And home exercise equipment is either super crappy or very expensive. But it is also the most reasonable approach.

So it is solutions time. I got a nice exercise bycicle (not a peloton), an yoga mat (the wife already had that one) and an exercise program that uses only those two resources. Not as efficient without dieting, not as measurable and broad as the gym, but it fits my workflow. Deploy to production!

A few months pass and the dataset grows. The signal is subtle but has support - it works! The handling, however, needs improvement, since I cannot often enough get with the exercise program. Some mornings are just after some hard days.

I start thinking about what else I can improve in the program, but it is already pretty lean and full of compromises.
So I pull an engineer and start thinking about the support systems and draft profile. What else could be draining my willpower and morning time?

Chores. Getting the kids ready for school, firing up the moka pot, setting the off-brand roomba, folding the overnight-dried clothes, cooking breakfast, doing the dishes, cleaning the toilets. All part of my morning routine. It might benefit from some automation.

Last month I got that machine our elders call "wasteful" and "useless crap lazy entitled Americans invented because they feel oh-so-insulted for simply doing something by hand like everyone always did" - a "dish-washer".
Heh, I remember how hard was to convince my mother-in-law that an remote-controled electric garage door would not make she look like an spoiled brat.
Still to early to call, but I think that the dishwasher just saved me about 25 mins every morning. It might be enough to save willpower for me to do more exercise.

This is all so reflective of all data analytics cases really are out in the wild - the analytics phase seems so small compared to the gathering and practical problem-solving all around. And yet d.a. is what tells you that you are doing the wrong thing all along. Or on what you should work next.

Ok I know there have been a lot of similar rants to this one, but now I have to write one by myself!

Fuck freelancer.com or whatever that shit is called. I once started using it when I was in school because I thought it was a convenient way to earn money on the side without fixed work times, so I could adjust to how much time I have. But soon I realized that wouldn't happen. It is easy for me to make a website, I have written some css templates from scratch and can apply them, but when will these cocksucking assholes learn that $25 for a website is not only a joke, but a fucking insult? Or a logo for 4? In his video on fiverr, pewdiepie has a point on the thing where he said that you can shit out a logo in 2min and make an easy 4 to 5 bucks, but I like doing things more properly and I bet those fuckers will give you shit for not designing the perfect logo. I once accepted a job where I ended up busting my ass 3 days log for $100 and I thought that was the normal mess at the beginning, before you have former customers rate your profile, but I got perfect ratings and still didn't get or even find any proper jobs. Most are complete shit, like write a fucking book for me or design a fucking Website or pull a logo out of your ass, but some projects are just rediculous. I once saw a project where they wanted some engineer to do the layout for the pipes in a huge processing plant. Yeah, because engineers are so poor and unemployed, even when they are entrepreneurs they dont go to those shity sites. Since I am actually qualified for such a job, I applied just to see if I could land a job that is actually not shitty, but of course it turned out the person had no idea what he was talking about. It is basically a platform where people can pay you in exposure. And the absolutely fucking worst thing about it is that they get away with it. There are always a ton of people, mostly from countries where cost of life is significantly lower, who flood the freelance market with cheap, presumably horrible logos, mobile apps, websites, texts and apparently pipeline layouts. I haven't found a similar platform but where there are only high quality biddings. But that is something that I would love to use.

Sorry for long rant, no potato.

Oh fucking hardware virtualization.
how many times have I failed at setting sth up googled it and just read "check your BIOS ... and enable..."
Well I would IF I FUCKING COULD. THERE AIN'T NOTHING TO ENABLE ON THIS CHEAP CPU.

I know. I know. Should just get a newer setup, this lappy ain't that powerful anyways - but still - it's frustrating to get excited, start sth and than hit that dead end realizing they presupposed sth I don't have.

When I was 6yo I was playing next to my dad with his old PC on a good old CRT a game called “Sperms” where you catch sperm with condoms and every time you do it made a really loud “YIPPIE” sound. I was playing this game for 4 years.

Somewhere around when I was 10 my dad told me we should build a PC and I was asking “Why does everyone has to make their own PC?”, I didn’t yet know what an cheap ass my dad is, so we did. Had a lot of fun and was very scared of the PSU, like really scared.

It blew up a few months later because I switched the toggle on the back from 220v to 110v, and got even more scared of PSU’s until I started an electricians apprentice.

Anyways, one day my dad and I where at a friends place and I played Tux Racer on his super loud Maschine that would crash if you kept the side door of the table closed, it ran some kind of Linux and I was fascinated how “simple and clean” it looks. I got a mini-cd to install it at home and immediately was hooked because the windows installation was such a pain in the arse those years. I did that all by myself just because I also wanted to play Tux Racer at home.

Anyways, somewhere right before GTA IV came out I started with VB.Net and ever since I was totally hooked and spend more time doing that than actually going to school.

My dad didn’t care and just let me do this, my mum just made sure I would have been up at least after the first lession, I don’t miss the bus and that I went to bed in a timely manner, which never happened because the PC was in my room and my mum slept downstairs and couldn’t notice that I was doing script kiddie things after an hour or so of “sleeping”.

So yeah, they didn’t care and were happy I didn’t annoy them.

Actually I didn’t wanted to become a developer because I always wanted to have it be a hobby or something and I liked woodwork more, but then people more qualified than me were more stupid than this script kiddie that still just wanted to play Tux Racer. That’s it.

Reanimated an old e-ink tablet today.

First, I didn't even know it needed to be reanimated. I just copied my books there, but it didn't find them. When I connected it again, they were gone.
Factory reset. Format storage. The memory seems empty, but after rebooting I see that everything is still intact.
Ok, imma hit forums then. They tell me I need to replace the internal memory. But isn't that something you need soldering for? Wrong! The internal memory IS JUST A MICRO SD CARD on the motherboard. The card is some cheap no name one, and people tell the similar story of it burning out after like four years of use.
Damn! The vendor has the AUDACITY to charge for signing their firmware to be flashed to a new micro sd card.

But I won't go down this easily. I hit forums again, and apparently there is a tool to sign the firmware yourself, but you need to find the card's serial number. To do that, you have to flash a bootleg tool, boot from that card, and it will show you the data you need. Then, you have to insert them into some shady .ini file (why is everything touching bootleg firmware runs only on windows?).

So I do that. The problem is, I need an image for my book. I find some shady one online, sign & flash it — touchscreen doesn't work. But I have the official firmware. I put two and two together and figure out that if the reader is able to display the ui, it probably has the firmware update tool working. So, immediately after flashing, I launch the firmware update utility that picks up my firmware from the second sd card (yes, they have an additional external slot).

Bingo. It works.

So, here are the steps:
1. Find a shady sd serial number detection tool
2. Flash it on a memory card with a shady vendor-specific flashing tool
3. Insert the new (now shady) card
4. Boot, write down the serial number
5. Find a shady boot image online
6. Edit a shady .ini file of a shady self-signing tool to sign the shady boot image
7. Flash the altered shady boot image with the shady flashing tool on your memory card
8. Copy a shady firmware update on a new card
9. Insert both cards
10. Pray

I know there has been a million stories on people asking developers for free/cheap work, and having this happen constantly is probably one of the biggest ways coding has impacted my life, but it happened to me for the umpteenth time this morning and I'm still reeling from it.

A close friend of mine asked me to create a bespoke website for her new business. I currently work as a Software/Web Developer so I assume this made sense in her head to ask her friend first.

She gave me some requirements and seeing as I already had a figure in mind, I asked for her budget. She says - 'I don't want to say a figure and insult you with it being too low'.

I tell her I'll work out a figure that benefits both of us, seeing as I would be using this as experience to try out some new stuff and she doesn't want it done until January. Because of this I was already going to give her a great deal on it anyway (in comparison to what it would be if I charged her through the company) because it would practically be a project I'd work on if I had a spare evening.

She said, and I quote: 'We preferably don't want to spend more than £200, and if it's less that is even better'.

I think I was actually more insulted that she thinks something I do for a living is worth £200 or less.

She thinks that designing, programming and writing content for a website is worth < £200.

I think she'll be shocked when I give her the quote that I had in mind. Looks like she'll be getting a WiX website or something for that kind of money.

How the fuck did my company decide a single toilet stall is enough? Are they really this cheap? Why must I go to the bathroom three times before I can actually use it? Why do they think one is enough for 100 male employees? In their defence, they do have urinals, but I'm not comfortable using them.

So many questions and I STILL NEED TO GO!

Well the company I work for was too cheap to buy a new Graphics Card so we got an old graphics card (nvidia) and had to install it with working drivers

We checked and the drivers were End Of Live since I think 2015 or 2011 so we downgraded the hell out of ubuntu 20.04 Kernel, Compilers and the driver installation still failed We had to get the gcc 7.2 but there wasn't any PPA's available with this anymore and the installation still failed without giving proper error message 11 Hours later we decided to go home

The next day we got an Email we wasted time and money of the company

but we were asked to do this.... (two working students getting minimum wage)

So this might be a very long post , but i am sure most of you can relate to it .

So , the year end . Time of joy and appraisals right?You have slogged your ass off the entire year and are expecting amazing ratings.Then boom , your piece of shit sadist manager starts of his review by saying 'there are worrysome things to discuss' after not saying shit for the entire year . I am pretty new to corporate , in fact 1 year old , still managed to handle devops for a team of 130+ , majority of whom have no work apart from playing a blame game and indulging in cheap politics. I mean , bro , I am literally your son's age , i dont see the point in playing this cheap shit with me.On top of that this sadist and borderline piece of shit manager has the audacity to say that I did not raise any blockers , while I have CCed him in every fucking mail possible.How big of an a****** can you be bro?
I counter his points for 40 45 mins straight ,leaving him stuck without words for solid 10 to 15 seconds many times during the 'review meet'. This guy is in the same place working on the same shit code , which 90% of this community can't even think of. Every thing is bloody manual and apparently ' I should have tried to streamline the entire f**** process' . Cool bro , why not open a startup while I am at it ?

Then this piece of poop gives me a rating which is just above the inconsistent performer bracket :) .

I just dont get the points what do these people get by giving shit ratings and not even having valid points to back up their fuck all arguments.This guy , throughout the duration of the call did not say 1 (bloody 1 ) good thing about my efforts. Past context is majority of the smart people who were literally running their pods single handedly , were under him and were fed up with not getting hikes and appraisals.Apart from me ,everyone resigned and left with hikes as high as 50% (LOL right).

But I have a year of experience and its really difficult to perform well in 4 rounds of bs compititive coding rounds, after which I get the generic ' oh you did well bro but we are moving on with other candidates' (FFS) .

I pray that even my worst enemies don't get such managers and I hope he rots in hell.

Amen and sorry for the cussing :)

!dev

I hate family meetings!
I'm youngest in the whole family, everyone have a job but I'm just student in first year on uni.

Almoust everyone treats me like a child and ask me questions about school. I hate it!

Plus my mom brought MY electric guitar (cheap ST imitazion from second hand) which I have only for a year, to aunt's husband, WITHOUT EVEN ASKING ME! OK, he played a guitar and he had a band but still, IT IS MY GUITAR YOU SHOULD ASK ME FIRST!!!

Also I don't have time for practicing, so I'm not very good at it, I was so embarrased when they want me to play somethig.

OH GOD WHY? WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO ME?

P.S.:
Sorry for my english.

Most definitely not dev related..

Guitar tabs that contain arrangements for +5 guitars on a band with just a rythm and lead guitar are fucking annoying.

Fucking hate having to piece the fucking melody by myself. And yes. I DON'T neeed the fucking tabs since I can figure the song by ear, its just that doing it like that takes way too much fucking time.

Getting fucking bored of playing the guitar tho. Been doing it since I was very young and never really liked it. Always wanted violin and then bass.

Have been looking at a nice fender precision bass. Made in Mexico so not really expensive, sounds equally as good and is going for a good $650 bucks plus the amp.

No lie, i am way too interested on getting me that bass already. Have been learning Roundabout by Yes(because I am a progressive rock fan AND a Jojo fan) and practicing with a friends bass whenever I get the chance.

If you already play guitar and you are good with guitar then picking up the bass takes some adjustment, but it's still not as heavy as going at it with no musical training.

Man I just want a bass so bad. I am just so cheap at spending money.

Me - "Talks to client about his deliverable"

Him - So when can we show a demo?

Me - On thursday we could show a totally working deliverable.

Him - "Really on thursday? i was hoping to get it done for tomorrow"

My mind - *Dude. do you even know how much time does it takes to finish the latest changes you just asked me today? i mean probably we could get it done if you weren't so cheap at the proposal, you know, when I told you we would take longer if i dropped the price. And I could have a couple more devs working here so we could had the finish product a week ago, and still we are on time... so WTH dude *

Me - No, sorry I wouldn't dare to show you a half baked demo. But ill try my best to show you before that day.

Webhost (that I basically only use for email) decided to get rid of all plans they had in favour of 1 big "unlimited" (with FUP ofc) plan...
I used to pay about 3,65 a year (incl. VAT) for my plan (which had about 1250MB of storage) which was totally fine...
Good enough storage for mails.

The new plan costs me 55 euro a year (incl. VAT) and has that "unlimited" storage...
Which I don't need for a fucking mail server...
And they don't allow me to go back to my old plan >.>

Literally the only reason why I went with them 7 years ago was because they were so cheap (back when they also still hosted my website) and perfectly fit my needs >.>
Way to shoot your longest time customers in the back.

Well, time to look for an alternative T_T

How do I get gud? Been coding in Python for a while now and I still have a little bit of a problem figuring out where to go. I can read the docs and generally construct a decent program if it's fairly simple. Go anywhere beyond what I know I end up having to google for examples. Not sure if that's how many people do it but I feel like it's cheap. I feel like I'm taking bits of code, modifying it, and slapping part of my own code to it. I'm trying to teach myself how to make my own program without any major help from Google.

I'm still new so I think it's okay for the most part but I don't want to be a half ass programmer who more or less just googles and slaps things together. I want to sit there, think of a problem, and think "Oh I can use this module to help me with this and I can create this function using xyz and that should solve it!" I'm sure part of that comes with practice, but what else can I do to get gud and not be a lousy coder?

Im ok with working for your startup for 2 years for peanuts. Im ok filling in 5 other types of jobs on the way while u still fucking micromanage everything, rendering all designers useless and making them leave after a few months. Im ok telling u its ok when u say u know how hard it is to keep going cause im such a positive team player. Im ok buying my own computer cause u r too cheap to buy a device that can run fucking Safari. Im ok working day and night for years carrying your company on a promise that when u sell i wont be forgotten. Im even ok with new people making way more than me from the new investment for which i worked my ass off for years, almost burning myself out. But if you sell the company for big money and get rich without even telling me, I WILL FUCK YOU UP.

p.s. true story, second employee, got taken advantage of heavily. still working there acting like im not in the know, waiting for next move.

I have a rant. A genuine rant, not a funny story, etc.

I want a keyboard. I need one. It can cost €500, as long as it won't break in a year and fulfils all my needs. Make it a €1000, I don't care. What are my needs then? Well...

It has to be a split keyboard - two halves. But wireless in every aspect, ergonomic, with multimedia keys on its outer edges (preferably pointing outwards, not up) and a heavy metal trackball on the right outer edge (preferably upper right corner). That's a bare minimum.

On top of that it probably some magnetic scrolls for things like navigating pages, changing volume and fidgeting in general wouldn't hurt. Also I'd prefer it to snap back into a one-piece whenever I need it to lie on my knees, e.g. when I type while sitting on a coach (I have a coach PC setup, no desk, and there's a reason). Why do I need it to split then...?

I had an accident. Kind of broke my back when I was 11. It's mostly okay now after couple years of rehabilitation and many more years of careful living. Luckily the only two wheels I ride on are powered by a 105.97 hp @ 9,970 rpm engine. Still, I try to be careful so I tried tons of work hygiene techniques over the years and I found out anything over 2 hours is best done while lying flat.

Coding while lying flat has its challenges, mostly focused around screen and input. Ever since I got a VR headset half of them got solved but the other half - acquiring a suitable keyboard - it's very hard to satisfy. I tried that with a one-piece keyboard lying on my stomach. Turns out actively bending elbows quickly wears them out (hello tennis players). So a split keyboard it has to be. So far I tried 4 different ones and I had to modify the cable connecting both halves in each and every one of them so that it'd be long enough to go behind my back. The main cable itself I only had to modify once because usually there're extensions available.

Apart from cables, all of those keyboards had issues. Starting from some kind of de-syncing when keys from both halves would randomly register in a wrong order - I didn't know it's possible with a cable connected halves... I did try two generic WiFi keyboards (using one for each hand) and they unfortunately suffered from that very same issue but I was sure it wouldn't happen if the device was designed to be a one unit from the very beginning, right? And yet it in 2 of the tested devices.

Other than that, plugs disconnecting on their own forcing me to take off the headset and fiddle around, too high key travel that'd strain the wrists after a few hours, even the noise that would wake up my girlfriend sleeping in a separate room were all a common issue (I briefly had an almost completely silent WiFi mechanical keyboard from Logitech we both really liked, but it was a one-piece). Once I got a split keyboard that was "natively" WiFi but not only the two halves were still connected with a cable that turned out to be way too short for my needs, it also had a very noticeable lag despite the high price - a lag way higher than any of the cheap WiFi keyboards I owned in the past. So I sent it back. Now IDK what to do because AFAICT there are no more models available, at least where I live.

So yeah, I need a keyboard and I'll probably have to make one myself. Sorry, just had to vent.

Just found an old project where I tried getting a version of ubports to boot up as an AVD... Fuck me I really wish I could remember how I was going to do this...

Still can't find a supported device cheap enough :'-(

I'm currently doing my work on a desktop pc and I wanted to get a notebook, for doing my stuff on the go.
Do you have any ideas which notebook I could get (maybe a cheap but still strong notebook)?
I heared that MacBooks are pretty nice to work with, but I don't think that I have the money for it... :(

So I'm going to wait a bit longer to actually buy the phone since I want to have at least had my S7 for a year before I buy a new one, but for those who saw my other rant about buying a new phone, I've made a decision.

I'll be buying a One Plus 5. It's just... How can you even say there's a better phone out there? So far the only phone faster than it is the Note 8, and eventually iPhone 8. The only difference is that those phones are $1000, and the 1+5 is only just over $500. (Don't believe me? Go watch the phonebuff speed tests with it. It actually beat an iPhone 7+. The first phone to do that in a couple years)

Sure, it doesn't have any of that great screen tech in the S8. But it's still got a great AMOLED screen, and it's battery lasts much longer than most of its competition. And Dash charge is much faster than Samsung's fast charging. Did I mention it's only 500$? Selling my phone would make they $350! How tf is it even that cheap?

Look, I'm not saying other phones out there are bad. Not at all. Hell, I love Samsung's phones. But the 1+5 is just better than the S8 or any other current flagship.

so my friend and I are canvassing NLEs for our guys at the Post Production squad in our project (we were in charge in infrastructure). We looked at Premiere since it's kinda ok until we found Black Magic Design's Da Vinci Resolve.

First of all, I was suprised with the price. 299 for the Studio Version? Holy fuck, that's cheap as hell! Then there's a free as in free software version which has the core editing features with 1080p rendering. So we grabbed that and kinda suprised it requires postgres but as seeing Resolve having collab and render queues, it makes sense.

Installed them on the PCs the postprods gonna use, they were amazed. We literally saved 500 bucks for an NLE. When they asked how much is it. Our reply was:

"That's free".

and there was silence...

"And it's also 299 bucks for the cooler version".

And silence still ensued.

Guess our guys wasted alot of money on a pipeline that is cheap as hell but more jam-packed than any other NLE found in the market.

Props to you BlackMagic Design.

My reasoning is stupid, I just think it's cute in a pimp my ride kind of way. I heard you like getting colossally pounded in the fucking ass, so we put a virtual machine inside your compiler so you can use your binaries while you compile your binaries.

But there is a practical angle to it, too. It's state, structures and execution within the code itself -- that is, in a sense, generators "embedded" within the source, but without any kind of special syntax.

Rather, the code is all the same, and I'd have the option to make calls at compile time: the output of these calls could, in turn, be part of the resulting binary or processed by further calls.

It'd greenlight the wildest fuckery in the jungle, because *that* is the true and ultimate abstraction: programs that write other programs with minimal human intervention. But is my (still) theoretical, cheap ass two-dollar prototype approach held together with clown jizz and prayers better than the endless cumloads worth of corporate investment that's dumped and pumped into generative AI on a daily basis?

Well... **lights cigarette**
That's what we're about to find out, mother fuckers.

Was in a university group project and had to make an angular momentum measurement device. An hour before demo voltage on one of the pins was still a bit too high. Friend drove to Chinatown not too far away from campus and bought a pack of the cheapest batteries. Plugged the cheap batteries in, the voltage was just spot on. How awesome was that!

It's 2021 and I'm still pretty much never willing to pay for software. I hunt and scour looking for free plans or ways around paid plans. Trials are good.

I've even searched "warez".

And the funny thing is, I'm not cheap, I'm jealous.

Rant/Help me

3 months ago:
"Hey, the domain I want isn't taken and Vultr has some cheap hosting plan, only 2.5$ a month for VPS WOW, gotta get it!"

5 minutes later:
"Okay, I bought the domain, time to buy hosti- where is the plan?.. SOLD OUT? How?.. Okay, that's not a big deal, I'll wait a day, week or even a month if I have to, maybe the plan will be available then"

That was 3 months ago, the plan is still 'Sold Out' and me being a starving uni student, I won't invest my hard earned money into 5$ plan if I know 2.5$ plan exists!

(Help me, as in - suggest a cheapo but goodie hosting, if that's not agains rules heh).

just a thought : the advancement in AI is going to result in a lot of porn and fetishes reaching an even higher audience. comparing the advancements in generations :

gen x :
- porn is limited to magazines and comics
- people are crazy about sex but only in their homes

gen y :
- porn as an industry gets established. a few companies with good money starts hiring people and create porn as content.
- the governments are sceptical and puts lots of regulations in this industry resulting in those japenese sensored porns and porn being shared like drugs in market (secretively)
- only the curious people are able to get access porn with lots of hardwork

gen z/curren5 gen :

- porn as a concept is still a taboo in religions and general public , but government is lineant and does not /could not stop its distribution
- porn accessible to anyone with an internet
- content creation no longer a high investment business, lots of small companies and even individuals become content creators
- rule 34 flourishes resulting in a lot of fetishes . wherever there is an idea, there maybe some content creator making a video, comic or art on that idea.

next gen :

- AI creates realistic porn on any idea. the access to such ai models becomes cheap . thus anyone who is a consumer can become a producer, resulting in even more content generation
- since ai can use non real people to make porn, the stigma around porn reduces and mature content gets more mainstream ( r rated movies getting family friendly ratings)
- rise of hate porn, deep fakes, resulting in either the concept of hate porn getting less audience , or direct decrease of extroverted professions ( no real actors/actresses to shoot movies)

just some thoughts around porn lol

Its feels so damn good to know we live in a time where computation has become so damn cheap that Amazon gives away a Tesla configured system for around 2.5$ an hour ... Like seriously.. all this progress took it's time .. but still seems really fast .. well .. good for us .. no rant here 😂

Wrote a new feature for our flagship product in C. Worked perfectly, no issues. I was told to wait before submitting to SVN.

Because my company is a little cheap in engineering, they took my Green Hills license for another dev to use. I wasn't using it, and now can't compile.

Then, a month later, I was asked to submit my feature to the repo, they needed it in done version, do I did. Still not able to recompile to see if other changes broke anything...

As you probably guessed, no one's code complied after pulling from the repo! Big embarrassment. Weeks later I was told that it wasn't my fault in the end... I don't remember how my code impacted it, but man, it was a bad day for this dev.

Never again!

I know and I understand why people still opt for Windows but if they also try to pirate it, that's the only time to tell them to go get Linux. If they're too cheap to get the Windows license, go Linux.

buying a car is such an exhausting and depressing experience. i feel like being less of a man and somewhat blind right now.

I, a 24 year old guy, have never driven a car. afaik, we were poor, my city's public infrastructure is very good and cheap, and my family majorly never needed it.

6 years ago, i got my first 2 wheeler. i still didn't needed it but dad did, and so i learnt it a bit, was somewhat comfortable driving it on my own, gave a driving test, failed, nd forgot about it ( coz again, still not needed much). to this day this bit is true about me.

at that time my father had bought a few scooters before, so he had some experience, and we ended up buying a new one. currently that fella sits outside our home and my father uses it for supplies.

coming to 2023, i was/am thinking of buying a car. why? coz (1) car trips while sitting in the backseat have been super fun (2) people with cars tend to reach anywhere independently, and help others easily (3) my few friends have one and they are super smug about it and (4) i am starting a wfo job which requires 2 days of wfo and is 60km away from home (although train route with 3 interchanges is less time taking)

but WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK WHEN YOU *THINK* ABOUT BUYING A CAR!?

1. buy first or learn to drive first or get a driving license first?
getting a learner's permit is like filling a form; driving schools require no documents but money, and car sellers also do not want any complicated documents. so first step is easy for all.
HOWEVER, driving schools teach the very basics and are controlling your car for 90 % of the time. you can't learn without having your own car, but at the same time you can't buy new car just to *learn*, you will end up denting it.

2. the confusion around how to buy a car?
there are so many fucking parameters.

money being tha major 1 : old cars are coming from $800-$12000 new cars start at $8000 . my current budget is aroud 3-4k as I want to learn on it first with an expected usage of <1000 km per month

brand : there are literally 1000+ models whose base varients start at 8-9k and whose used version is available in my range. i have no idea how to choose.

year : in our country, a petrol car's registration expires in 15 years. cars from 2009 to 2012 are coming in my range but they are gonna expire in 1-4 year . not sure if its a deal breaker, as i plan to buy a new car later, but people are warning me about usage.

km driven : not 1 person is there who i talked to and told me to trust the kms on odometer. most of the cars i saw show 30-60,000kms driven but i am expecting them to be 5-7x more

cng/petrol : cng is cheaper, while petrol is better for engine life, from what i heard. I was inclined towards cng, but everyone i discussed adviced against this as those cars tend to have been driven for very long due to mileage efficiency.

engine power, cc, power steering, body... there are so many stuff that neither i know about and nor am i considering, which makes me more sad and scared of these deals. i have never bought anything without a proper research.

overall its the first time when i am feeling so much dependent on others and being an inefficient and inexperienced adult . my family once bought a used car 10 years ago, which was a total sham and got us to spend so much on it that we had to sell it for scrap in 3 months. It was a painful and nightmarish experience. i don't want that.

My computer has gone to repair so for the meantime I'm computer-less. Which sucks big time because I have projects and tests coming up (not to mention personal projects and other stuff I've been asked to do) and I kinda have to leech off my friends and I don't like doing that, but, for now, it's what I'm doing. My old toshiba couldn't handle whatever I have to do, damn thing should be going through menopause or something. I wasn't a good owner LoL
I never really know if it'll boot during the first minute after I turn it on or if'll take it hours to do so, so I don't wanna risk it taking it with me to uni 😬 Not to mention it's still running Vista 😅
So my brother left to go to a friend's house until sunday so for the today and tomorrow I have access to the beast that is his computer ☺
I don't mean beast as a bad thing, it's a good computer, but it has an almost full SSD and I need to install a couple things so I can work on it :') (I'll uninstall them later and try to leave it as I found it LoL)
I can finally take a bit to play as well 😥 as I haven't been able to do so, as not only my PC is on repair, but I've been leaving uni late (after midnight - I valour my sleep OK). Luckily one of my house mates lets me use her PC after she goes to bed or her bf arrives to our house. The other day I managed to install steam and play a bit (she gave me permission to do so and I uninstalled them later) 😂 her computer almost died on me, it only has 4GB of RAM :') poor thing was over working to keep up LoL
Now, my brother's computer has a mechanical keyboard and besides the macro keys (they're on the far end of the keyboard, where you'd expect the shift/ctrl/caps lock/etc keys to be), I'm loving it tbh. It's a cheap keyboard, my mom didn't want to buy anything too fancy for him, but I like the sounds it makes 😅 may get one for myself (a mechanical keyboard I mean LoL. I really liked one I saw here on devRant that looked like a typewriter but it's WAY out of my league for now HaHa)

Just fucking hate how expensive and hard to find a cheap SMS gateway

And as in cheap, I mean cheap as send email

I found Cheap Global SMS and it doesn't have a professional website nor a good API but it is way more cheap

Downside? I must pay with a payment gateway made by the same company (coincidence?)

And NO WAY I'm sending my id to a payment gateway that no one uses

I'll try sending some random image to see if they accept it

But, still, no confidence to put my credit card in there

For those that do any kind of non-trivial tech blogging, what platform/product/etc would you recommend?

I've found pros and cons to rolling my own (several times) and static generators like Jekyll and Octopress, hosted services like Medium and Ghost, but self-hosted Wordpress is still my pick at the moment. I would be keen to hear what others are using and what advantages you get (e.g. ease of deployment, good editing experience, cheap hosting, lightweight / performant, versatile code embedding and presentation etc)

Looking for potential clients on Upwork is like finding a holy grail these days.

Cheap clients with laughable budgets and high expectations on the right.

"Devs" and "Designers" with questionable skills who will work for the lowest rate possible on the left.

And don't forget the ever growing service fees and absurd measures like turning your profile private if you don't make any income in 30 days. Suuure, that's totally going to help anyone who isn't willing to work with low rates.

I am getting done with Upwork. Back on Elance I managed to get a couple of really good clients for long term projects and good commissions. Here it's impossible, even with lower rates.

You're competing against people whose portfolio involves changing a few colors for a envato template or logos made of stock graphics, and they are still more likely to be hired over you because they are willing to work on a t-shirt design for $4!

Networking is where is at. Getting contacts, talking to people, force yourself to introduce to companies as a potential asset.

That's how you get the good projects, right?

... Right, folks?

some old time clients finally decided to pay me, so I had a bit of cash on me (I feel rich, lol).

here's the thing: I am torn in between buying a second monitor and investing in that server i planned to build in a previous rant.

I could just save the money, I dont know if I am being extra right now, I remember when I just had half a laptop screen to work with, now i have a this used 24 inch monitor I bought for cheap now I want to expand with another 24 inch probably. this arrangement will make things a bit comfortable and faster for me but it still wont affect me if I dont get it...........ok I'm talking too much

Listening to clients & producing goods for a ridiculously cheap price & still manage to get yelled at. I swear everyone wants shit done for free. That's the amazing part of being a developer :)

Often when i see the annoying as hell t debug exceptionless let’s just bomb entirely but blazing fastness of c and c++ I feel like a nettard
I use c# for its immutable strings clean syntax and beautiful class markers that are redundant compared to c++ but ensure you tell after adding 1000 methods and total lack of all special characters to indicate reference and derreference and pretty lambda syntax... sure it’s lib poor but I get shit done goddamn it and can read my own code later
So why do I feel empty inside every time i run a ./configure and make under Linux like I’m missing some secret party where neat things are being done and want to sob like I do now
I am not a dotnettard even though 5.0 is an abomination in the eyes of man and god ! Even though Microsoft cooks up overcomplex framework technologies that make a wonderful language underused and make us all look like idiots that they then abandon into the scrap heap! We can’t help Linux users haven’t discovered how much nicer c# is and decided to implement it on their own and port their horrible undocumented ansi c bullshit can we ???? Oh god I feel
So hollow inside and betrayed ! Curse
You gates curse youuuu! Curse you for metro direct3d xna wpf then false promises of core ! May you have a special place in hell reserved for you and your cheap wallpaper shifting monitor paintings and a pool speaker that playeth not but bee jees and ac dc forever and ever amen !

Speaking of which do any c/c++ ides have anything that even begins to rival intellisense on Linux and don’t use some weird ass build system
Like cmake as their default ?

Oh sweet memories of time a while back when I already wrote this and still wasn’t getting then tail I deserved

Again

Ok, @jestdotty , today, i give up on china.

I've been messaging with a rep who is taking the time to keep editing a contract... Im pretty sure she was genuinely trying...

As typing this we finally got to a 'correct enough' contract... so I could click the damn pay button.

Over the past 7 hrs.. at 3 back and forth exchabges and modifications at each issue:
1. Used previous PI from the dude i gave up on... so had a qty at 12 when only 11 exist a colour wrong for a crate of items, and listed the dude i refused to sign a contract under listed as the rep.

2. Now the item subtotals were off... just a few pennies or so... assumed she left the usd prices but calculated with ¥... didn't want alibaba to reject in a day so i checked if it was noted anywhere... Oh boy was it... VERY clearly, all caps, bold in the body of the total row... that the total was, exactly, 11680 (spelled out ofc) RMB aka ¥ chinese yen. I told her this, she sends me a cropped shot of the $ numeric total field... so i sent her the giant all caps bolded line, the one thatd typically be considered final say in most international courts... no clue where that value came from, it had zero relation to any actual values... and i was as curious as when chatGPT creates totally new, unique, lyrics for satirical german songs... i really tried.

3. Wrong incoterms (trade terms... abbreviated to a few letters... had it that I'd be physically going to the tbd port to accept/clear customs... no)

4. Technically it was accurate (well a few strange subtotals since she used ¥ half the time... told her it was fine as long as it had the company name on the label (gave 3 full examples to use whichever)
I get the contract ...shipping...
"To: Sara"
Then the right address (seriously wtf)

5. I point this out and carefully explain in mostly just examples and "the us government doesn't like anything being sent to just a first name, there's no legal way to sign for acceptance"

6. She gets stressed enough to tell me she doesn't have time to keep editing (since this horrid pile of poor formatting was just thrown at her a day ago... i dont point out the ridiculous irony)

7. Imo, the highlight of my night/morning... in her stress she promises me it'll ship right... sooo many issues there...
Even if it was delivered/allowed a signature for "sara" for 7ish large boxes just off a sea freight from china to a residence in the middle of a corn field (which tbh would be hysterical)...the IRS would have a valid reason to audit me... theyve done it w/o valid reasons several times, since I was 18 doing international trade and a contractual employee of a large gambling company, quarterly reporting, and ofc declaring more than my taxes in donating melted glass and crane game prizes...yea, they hate me and always do all that work to find the same thing... i underdeclare charity by 10%.

The entire concept of getting USA mail, even when pristine and you know logistics agents in every major company and port or distribution center, to properly deliver anything... ROFLOL ... and im already on some 'open and check everything' list with customs for a hysterical misconception they made years ago... cant/shouldn't get into detail publicly... but it was caused because 2 packages from different cities in China were both going to my address/through customs at the same time... package 1, 75 of those cheap af ball-pit hollow plastic balls for a 2yr old's bday(very delayed) package 2. 75 rechargeable batteries (the kind in power banks) 9600mah.

8. Told her to change "sara" to company name... glad it's registered to this address still.

It took me under 5min to type this... had to get the WTF out.

Dear AliBaba, please give an option to allow buyers to create the supply side contract for review, not just req modification... please?

I have a dream that one day companies will understand that most people who pirate music/movies/games etc. do it because they don't have enough money or because they can't get them any other way. They don't lose money, as those people are not able to buy their products anyway, instead, they gain supporters and possible future clients. Piracy is one of the reasons Windows is the king OS(prove me wrong...) and also the reason Game of Thrones is the most popular show on the planet. Instead of hunting torrent site founders maybe they could, I don't know, build great and cheap services. Spotify is such a service, no reason to pirate music anymore, but everything else still lies in the middle ages...

me: "say, TL, why don't I see any debug/info/warn logs in dev/qa environments?"
TL: "Yeah, we've disabled them, the logs are too expensive (ApplicationInsights)"

thanks bro... go debug this shit yourself...

commodore amiga 500, when I was 5 or 6.
what was the very first thing on it that i experienced, i don't know, but some things i remember:

Cannon Fodder 2
A-Train, a game that i played for months, it utterly fascinated me and i was utterly unable to keep my company afloat, because i was utterly unable to understand how the mechanics of the materials moving around worked (i still don't, actually, but in a different way)

some Apache simulator, which took us (me and father) literally a week to figure out how to get into the actual game from the main menu stylised as a military office. it took us several days to even realize it's the menu.

the Lotus Esprit 2 game, which we played regularly.

some Airbus simulator where i took two weeks of trial and error to figure out how to take off, without manual.

some experiments with midi sequencing and notation music programs.

how every two months, dad came with a 20page long list of programs and games from some pirate seller, which we would go through, mark stuff that sounded interesting (going by name only), then he would send it by post to him, and after a week, we would go take a package from post office full of floppies, literally like 200, and the next two or three weeks, we would be trying all of it out, seeing what the things we got were about, putting the good ones on one pile, the boring ones on another (cheap floppies for use)...

ah the magical times of wonder and exploration...

!dev Nice surprise... Hopefully...

Been having a lot of teeth problems and need like 2 crowns and 1 filling now... Old fillings just suddenly fell out. My regular dentist plan is ok for cleaning but isn't so good for these expensive treatments. And it seems the dentists in network are sorta so-so... The original fillings were done by them like last year....

Well somehow it popped up into my mind that with COVID.... Given its a health crisis and the govt is bending over backwards to deal with it... it may also let me change insurance plans during the year.

Usually enrollment is once a yr until you change jobs... But when I googled I saw that apparently they did.... Though it's upto the employer and the insurance company. They have to negotiate and allow it. Not required to by law.

So anyway last week, I called up my HR asking if they allow it. The rep said they'd need to ask higher up and get back to me this Monday.

I never got a call though but today I took off to deal with all the health stuff and just take a personal day. So I called my "current" dentist insurance to ask what I needed to do to see a specialist for the root canal crown as regular dentist can't do this one.

But they couldn't find my policy because it turned out it was cancelled last week. At this point I'm likeOK WHO FUCKED UP... WHAT THE BLOODY FUCK... IM UNINSURED NOW?!!!

I login to the company benefits site to get their support #. But it also shows my current plans. Where it shows that it got switched.

I still had to call the new insurance to get my ID info...

But I'm like hm... This seems to have worked out well... Assuming everything goes as planned. Basically got 1/2 year on cheap normal coverage but now that I need it, got to switch to the more expensive coverage, which now comes out better: lower overall costs, and better drs...

I know the video editing software LightWorks has its aficionados. I can see how it's powerful. I've been using it since at least version 12. But my gosh how it screws people over. In the latest version, when you import files into a project and then want to delete _just the reference_ to the files in the project, LightWorks says "Nope, imma delete the FILE, too!" So you can never just start over with an import. When you import a bunch of still photos in one shot, no matter how many, it imports them all as an unwatchably fast 1 second video sequence instead of as an individual file. Like...what? And they've dumbed down the interface so much that there's no toolbar. You have to right-click poke at everything to try to find where stuff is. And right clicking is NON-EXISTENT on a Mac. I had to use a pen tablet to achieve it. I'm too cheap to buy Adobe Premiere for the few times I have to edit video in a year, so I guess it's just ShotCut on Windows for the rest of my life.

I am working on partitioning my life and getting my tech stuff and online life organized. Partially fun, partially dread. Still one of the better things I'm dealing with right now.

Tech stuff mainly includes desktop PC (Qubes OS), network (to be driven by openwrt) and smartphone (already running Lineage OS, but I want to build my own LOS). This is the fun part. I want to add a NAS, but I'm too cheap for a proper one (at least for my >20TB media).

Furthermore offline stuff: Remove clutter, get analog documents properly organized (with a sustainable system) and possibly digitalized. I already have maybe half of the things I own in boxes each with a specific purpose (e.g. audio cables, network cables and game controllers each have their own box). Can be tiresome, but it's easy to see a progress and that makes it quite okay.

Online life: That's a big one. A large chunk is email and the hundreds of website accounts. I have them in a keepass file, but all running under the same address. Unfortunately I need to have a Facebook account for some purposes, but I'd like to start over with a new one. Not so easy when you have to transfer group admin privileges though, when I tried the last time I tripped some system and the new account was banned. Annoying.

spent a few days trying to track down the cause of a thermal shutdown in my workstation. intel 4790k with no overclock would spike to 95C on one core (core1) whenever maxing out all 8 threads, be it real work, mprime, anything with 100% cpu being used. I quadrupled my RAM from 8gb to 32, because its cheap and id like to have all data in memory sometimes, not because I thought that was the problem. I reseated my watercooling block. I checked out the PSU. I unplugged all unnecessary peripherals, drives, etc. It turned out to be a bug in Gigabyte MOBO BIOS (causing temps to be read incorrectly i think, still not exactly sure...) updated from version 5 to 10 and poof now temps are back in the high 50's at full load. it only took 2 days to figure out and i think i learned something

trying to clean off my mac (yes i managed to fill nearly 1 terabyte)

and holy shit whoever is closest to guessing the size (in Gb, yes it's that bad) of the old 🤡 startup i worked for wins...

god yet another detriment to the years of my life wasted

i'm also still on node 18 lol, totally missed the maintenance date on that one

my life is in shambles

serious question - would you be willing to pay $1 a year or something stupidly cheap for emails when a software goes into maintenance? i sure as hell would pay for that